The More I Seek

Wednesday night I accidentally dropped my phone in the parking lot and didn’t realize it was gone. I went back over every place I had been and searched with a fine-toothed comb, but it was to no avail. I had nearly given up hope, but this morning someone turned my phone in to security (thank you!).

During the time I was searching, however, I felt like God was trying to show me something, but I wasn't getting it. This morning when I woke up, I had a song stuck in my head. I found the song on Youtube, and began to listen to the words. The first line says, “The more I seek you, the more I find you.” As I began to hear the words to that song, I began to think about how it tied in with losing my phone.

No matter how much I looked for my phone, I wasn’t able to find it. I wasn’t looking in the right spot, so no matter how much effort I put up, or how much I tried looking for it, I wasn’t going to find it. But thankfully God isn’t like that! The Bible says in James 4:8 that if we draw closer to God, He will draw closer to us. In fact, He wants us to seek and find Him!

I thought about giving up in looking for my phone because I had no guarantee that I would find it, no matter how hard I looked for it. But the Bible says in Matthew 7:7-8, “Seek and ye shall find.” If you knew that if you looked hard enough for something you wanted that you would find it, would you stop looking after five minutes? Would you give up so easily, saying it wasn’t worth it? Why then do we seek God’s presence only to give up after a short time of prayer? Why do we stop seeking revival after one dry service?

I spent hours looking for my phone. Why? Because I felt like I had to have it. It was important to me. I dropped everything I was doing to try to find my phone, even calling my friends to have them help me look. How much more important should God’s presence be to us? To where we can’t be satisfied if we don’t have it with us constantly?

Let us not be satisfied with just a mediocre experience, with just a five-minute prayer life. Let us not be satisfied with just a routine search every week, going through the motions of church, but never really finding God’s presence.

Let us not be satisfied to stop seeking for revival until every part of our inward man shouts renewed, and our outward man lives it. Let us get so hungry for God’s presence that we have to stop everything we are doing in order to find it.

Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near:

Isaiah 55:6

Let's Clean House!

So just a really simple thought tonight.

I’ve been so busy with homework this week that I’ve let my room go. Last week we had a lot of snow days, and I let it go then, too, so I could hang out with friends. Every day, I think it has gotten increasingly worse, and tonight, even though I have a lot of homework I could and probably should be doing, I’m cleaning my room. It has gotten to the point to where I can’t stand it being so messy, and no matter what I have to put on the back burner, I’m cleaning my room.

And so it is with our relationship with God. Sometimes we get so busy having fun and being with friends that we just put our relationship with Him on the back burner. Maybe we push our Bibles to the side. Maybe we even let ourselves slip and do things we know better than to do. Then so often we give the excuse of being busy, even putting things we claim to be doing for God before God, instead of putting God first.

I was trying to justify not cleaning my room because I have so much homework and don’t feel like cleaning. How many times do we justify not reading the Bible or praying because we feel overloaded or just not in the mood? Sometimes we just have to drop everything and clean house.

There are times that no matter what we have to put aside, we should say, “God, I’m going to make time for you. I’m not going to allow interruptions. This is me and You time, and I need your help to clean up this house.” Don’t forget that when you invited Jesus into your heart, you invited Him to live there; wouldn’t it be terrible if He couldn’t live there any more because it was too messy?

Time for a house cleaning!